A community at war with itself

by Simon Edge

Yesterday Linda Riley, who owns what was once the UK's premier lesbian mag (now a platform for people who think men can be lesbians) and claims to have invented #LesbianVisibilityWeek, launched an attack on @jk_rowling for daring to praise black lesbian activist Allison Bailey.

Linda's tweet has so far received 28k likes – 28k people (many of them men with beards or people with anime avatars who weren't born when that pic of Allison was taken) who think it's 'hateful' to celebrate a veteran campaigner for lesbian and gay rights in #lesbianvisibilityweek.

Also yesterday, Owen Jones tweeted that 'transphobes' – by which he means people who think sex is real, gender ideology is harmful and lesbians and gays have the right to organise separately from the trans movement – should be banned from 'every lgbtq bar'.

Simon Edge @simonjedge

Owen Jones thinks gay men and lesbians with whom he disagrees politically should be banned from the venues we pioneered while he was in short trousers. Isn’t ‘inclusion’ marvellous? And in #lesbianvisibilityweek

That's the same Owen Jones who, just three weeks earlier, insisted there was no 'significant division' within 'Britain's LGBTQ communities' and anyone who said otherwise was lying.

He should make up his mind. Either there are hordes of dangerous heretics who need banning from the venues they themselves pioneered, or there is no dissent. Both can't both be true.

Actually, of course, in OJ's casuistical universe, they can. Note he talked about 'Britain's LGBTQ communities'. We who reject forced teaming with the trans movement and think 'queer' is narcissistic hogwash aren't members of the LGBTQ community anyway. Ergo it's not divided.

But anyone with a shred of intellectual honesty knows that's nonsense. We are divided by a massive fault line that has pitted lifelong friends against each other and threatens to wreck lives.

That's the real reason Riley tried to silence JKR: yesterday was also the first day of Allison Bailey’s court case against Stonewall, the charity which once fought brilliantly for lesbian and gay rights but now victimises anyone who challenges its dogma.

This is a community at war with itself – with ex Stonewall insiders Matthew Parris, Anya Palmer, Kate Harris and Simon Fanshawe all saying the charity has become a danger to lesbians and gay men – but where one side is desperate to keep that war a secret.

For example, the LGBT+ Consortium is an umbrella group comprising hundreds of organisations. They can be marshalled to sign joint letters whenever Stonewall asks, and it looks like stunning display of unanimity, with only the hated LGB Alliance in the carpers' corner.

But it's more casuistry. You're only allowed into the LGBT+ Consortium if you support the official line. These organisations form a bloated establishment with a massive vested interest in convincing their funders – overwhelmingly the taxpayer – that they represent their community.

Pretending dissent doesn't exist, except when it's useful to have an enemy, is a familiar Stalinist tactic. Orwell satirised it in Animal Farm. Napoleon (pictured L) and his enforcer Squealer (pic R) wrote Snowball out of history but then blamed him for anything that went wrong.

Is there any other minority community where this has happened? Do black and other minority ethnic organisations turn on each other, call for each other to be banned, and decry each other as hate organisations if one doesn't dance to the other's tune?

Has it happened with disability organisations? Actually, the only real parallel I can think of is the way women's organisations and institutions – from the Fawcett Society to Woman's Hour – have tried to freeze out the wrong kind of feminist for having the wrong opinions.

I'll leave you to work out the connection there. But in the meantime, I wish the national media would write about this civil war. It's an issue of national importance because the toxic ideology that caused it is in every school, university and hospital in the land.